ABOUT

Umbra is a quarterly newspaper on screen culture published by Lightcube out of India. Its pages feature major developments in the sectors of film preservation, film archiving, film society activism, funding for alternative films and film literature. Its focus is to establish a broad narrative or a lineage between the state of these areas in the past and their condition in the present. To this aim, Umbra runs a number of interviews, essays, program notes, festival coverage, listings and annotated filmographies in its issues.

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A work of fiction involving two women, who are talking to each other about something other than a man, is the premise of the Bechdel Test. The test, co-conceived by Liz Wallace, gained ground after its first appearance in Alison Bechdel’s 'Dykes

The Interview with the producer of the widely contraversial film 'Sexy Durga'. This interview brings insights into the film maker's life, his technique, his views on God and his struggle as a filmaker. This interview is from our Issue 8, called 'Our

The second part in the two part series based on the film - Naya Pata by Pawan. K. Shrivastava which takes forward the conversation on Migration and Displacement.'
I was born in a town in the Chhapra district of Bihar. Numerous industries had

The narrative of post-independence India is marred with mass migration, displacement and exodus. With the Nehruvian focus placed firmly on the ‘city’ as the portal to the future, rural centers all over the country have eroded as generations of

The image of the tortured artist has been prevalent in all fields of art and culture. It is taken for granted that in order to be a notable artist, one has suffer through some form of unimaginable pain preferably a broken heart. Mental health

The pivotal scene in The Insult consists of the exhibition of archival footage from Darmour in the court. We learn eventually that Tony – our chief plaintiff in the film, belongs to Darmour too. The footage seems to reveal the origins of his

Our coverage of the 2018 edition of the Habitat International Film Festival continues with Sebastiano Riso, director of Una Famiglia, was in competition at Venice International Film Festival 2017 and was recently screened at Habitat

Our coverage of the 2018 edition of the Habitat International Film Festival commences with our interview of Dita Rietuma, an acclaimed critic, academician, and now, a bureaucrat from Latvia. In 2014, she became director of the National Film Center.

Julia is an atheist, while her mother a devout Catholic doctor. Julia undergoes IVF treatment, but the decision is met with strong disapproval from her mother, who condemns the ‘unnatural’ nature of the scientific intervention in

Koumba has lived in Paris from the age of 2 till 20, when a street brawl that goes awry invites a background check. Her immigration papers are revealed to be fake due to a negligence on her family’s part, and she is deported back to Senegal

The first in a series of reviews from our coverage of the 2018 edition of the Lakeside Doc Festival at Naukuchiatal.
New York is a massive metropolis that makes people lose a sense of their self - just like any other major city from across

The desire to share and to be a part of something is very integral to the existence of even demons. Snehalatha Ramappa and Bharathy Singaravel explore this deeply methaphorical piece which talks about humanizing demons and also exploring the

The following is an excerpt from a piece written by Krishna Chaudhari, entitled, ‘The Image of Women in Indian Cinema’, included in the Feb-March 1982 issue of Cine Woman, the official journal of India’s first International Forum of Women’s

When it comes to contemporary Indian cinema, the documentary is where all the action is at. The sector is constituted by brief but significant bodies of work that establish their own peculiar engagements with the world at large, and yet, a similar

Mardur Gopalan Ramachandran was the face that could do no wrong in the public eye. He was the golden poster child of the DMK until his fall from grace. His expulsion triggered a massive backlash from his fan base (aside of being considerable they

Satyabrata Ghosh recounts his memories of the films of Anand Patwardhan and the particularly torrid early summer of 1992, where the effect of television images broadcast by the state news channel would be negated by those stored on a VHS-brick that

Through a reading of Roopa Rao’s independent web-series, The ‘Other’ Love Story (TOLS), Kashish Dua focuses on the integrated subversion of mainstream Hindi cinema and dominant hetero-patriarchal frameworks, highlighting the temporal

The humble Radio that has lived for more than a century and moved from the experimental existence to a household commonality is becoming invisible gradually. Globally, radio revolutionised the communication scenario and made it possible for people

While the turmoil that the Valley is mired in is not new, Malik Sajad's autobiographical graphic novel, Munnu, goes beyond the popular perception of the ‘Kashmir issue’ as an offspring of the Partition, and mines precedents for the extant

In a globalized era of filmmaking, it is imperative to understand how a country like Qatar, with a cumulative space for filmmaking, is developing its inner apparatus and industry to match Hollywood on one hand, and the urge to preserve its identity

From the Vaults: Issue 1 (Aug-Sept 2013)
The film society movement started with the aim to demarcate the vulgarized mainstream cinema that was regularly projected in cinemas and cinema as Art, writes H N Narahari Rao, Secretary, FIPRESCI

A city that rejects its architectural heritage – while expressing a preference for glass and concrete – ends up endangering its future. Patna seems to be on growth steroids, with its residents seduced by the appearance of ‘big buildings’ on

Pushpa Rawat is an emerging independent filmmaker who uses her camera to initiate a very personal dialogue with all the components of her immediate environment. Her films — Nirnay and Mod (a film supported by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences)

Sanal Sasidharan’s first two films, Oralpokkam and Ozhivudivasathe Kali, got him a lot of recognition and praise at home, but his third film, Sexy Durga, propelled him to international fame when it won the Hivos Tiger award at Rotterdam. Suraj

An email from Anuj, rather wistful, pushed us to make an effort to visit Regal cinema in Connaught Place for its last show ever. Although we were aware of the ancient cinema closing down that very day, somehow it did not upset me enough.

A Still from SangamAt a recently concluded documentary film festival, I watched an Alexandru Belc film, Cinema Mon Amour, about its manager’s struggle to keep one of the very last cinemas in Romania alive and functional. The camera follows the